The EA Relationship Escalator

When dating, you may typically encounter the relationship escalator, which is a social script for how relationships are supposed to unfold that is oriented around default societal expectations. Potential partners are supposed to follow a progressive set of steps and achieve specific visible milestones towards a clear goal.
 

This escalator frequently looks like:

1. Meet on a dating app
2. Go on a few dates
3. Hold hands, kiss
4. Become romantically exclusive
5. Fall in love
6. Meet the parents
7. Have a long weekend together
8. Vacation together
9. Move in together
10. Get engaged
11. Get married
12. Buy a house
13. Have kids
14. Have a dog
     

Of course the steps are approximate and may not unfold literally in this order, but it should be pretty close. Moreover, where you are on this escalator and how long it has been since the previous step is often used to judge whether a relationship is sufficiently significant, serious, good, healthy, committed, etc. and to tell whether the relationship is worth pursuing.

Effective altruists, as a community though, are rarely mainstream like this. This suggests that it may be helpful for EAs looking to date other EAs to have a very different and more customized social script to follow to judge how their unique EA relationship is unfolding.

I recommend the EA relationship escalator look like this:

1. Meet at EA Global but definitely do not flirt
2. Re-meet at a house party where flirting is allowed
3. Comment on their EA Forum posts
4. Reach out on their “Date Me” doc
5. Go on a few dates
6. Become awkwardly personally and professionally intertwined
7. Thoroughly assess together the conflicts of interest inherent in your relationship
8. Talk to your HR department
9. Talk to their HR department
10. Talk to the CEA Community Health team
11. Make a spreadsheet together to thoroughly quantify the relevant risks and benefits of your romantic relationship
12. Decide to go for it
13. Finally hold hands, kiss
14. Synchronize your pomodoro schedules together
15. Create a shared Complice coworking room / Cuckoo coworking room for just you two
16. Take the same personality tests and quantify each other
17. Introduce them to your polycule, hope they get along
18. Fall in love
19. Move in to the same EA group house
20. Synchronize your GWWC pledge donation schedules
21. Have your relationship details exposed by a burner account on the EA Forum
22. Have the EA Forum moderator team encode your relationship details in rot13
23. Meet the parents
24. Vacation together, but exclusively touring various EA hubs
25. Decide to fight the same x-risk
26. Raise free range chickens together, start an animal sanctuary
27. Create a Manifold market around whether or not you will get married
28. Get engaged
29. Get married
30. Maximize utility
     

Hopefully this EA Relationship Escalator helps give young EAs a social script to be able to find love with each other and be able to understand where their relationship currently is at.

After all, you may spend 80,000 hours of your life in a good marriage so it’s important to get this right!